Forbes ran a story with a lot of great details on Paramount’s new story room, which brings together a number of established writers and producers to create several ideas that would continue and expand the Transformers film universe. Today, June 8, is the first day of the story room’s operation, and it’s described as “the mutated child of a typical writers room and the transmedia arm of a multi-million dollar blockbuster movie’s marketing department.” Read on for the link and full details.

The story credits Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) for laying successful groundwork for what can be done with franchises effectively cross-selling themselves in canon as opposed to seeing each individual project and an independent effort. It also details how this group of 12 is going to come up a mythological timeline, brainstorm ideas, then each person is assigned with the task of developing one treatment each, totaling at least 12 ideas that could be pitched. Akiva Goldsman even mentions that “If one of the writers discovers an affinity for Beast Wars, they can drive forward on treatments that will have been fleshed out by the whole room.”

The story notes that the first order of business will be a sequel to Age of Extinction, and even says that the goal is to have it ready for Michael Bay to direct. But after that, it’s looking pretty apparent that this team is really digging into a big sandbox of all the iterations of Transformers, including toys, cartoons, comics, and video games to come up with the best ideas they can.

Whether you love or hate the idea, you have to admit it’s a bold strategy, and it’s going to shake up the film franchise for good, possibly setting the direction of that segment of the brand for a couple of decades.